109 comments:

The only difference here is that Michelle wouldnt stand up to you and after she said lets drop this and you wouldnt drop it. I think it was all in your tone; you sounded like her mother/teacher - kind of supportively egging her on; that guy in your shoes in the other video sounded like a mocking peer.

Goldberg looks like a child being scolded and does not want to be around to hear the criticism of the obtuse nonsense she was spouting out to simply defend her dear leader. Man, leftards are absolutely deranged in their belief system and warrants the moniker about them as dead-bolts.

The only difference here is that Michelle wouldnt stand up to you and after she said lets drop this and you wouldnt drop it. I think it was all in your tone; you sounded like her mother/teacher - kind of supportively egging her on; that guy in your shoes in the other video sounded like a mocking peer.

That may be what you wanted to see, but clearly she became instantly uncomfortable and did not want to discuss any long the ridiculous claims that Dreams Of My Father was a literary tour de force. Althouse was clearly eviscerating her position to the point of this leftard buffoon crying uncle. Don't be a hapless leftard okay? Try to be a leftard that can own up to critical thinking. None of which was exhibited on Goldbergs side.

I just finished listening to the diavlog with Eli and Matthew before reading your post but I was also reminded of your encounter with Michelle (I hope you'll excuse my presumption of using everyones first names).

It is interesting to see the video and how it changes my perception. Both Michelle and Matthew were clearly uncomfortable (Michelle squirms and Matthew has a forced grin) but Eli was clearly more shocked by this turn of events than you were. Which I think allowed you to control the situation in a way he couldn't.

But this all reminds me of a conversation I once heard on a podcast by two people who disagreed with Scalia (perhaps a slate podcast). "We really need a Scalia who will argue our opinion" "You mean someone who makes clear cogent arguments?" "Yeah, someone who uses those."

Some people think that having clear cogent arguments is just a set of tools in a debater's arsenal; they believe the cogency is related to the arguer and not to the conclusion. So if someone they are debating with is making more cogent arguments than they are they tend conclude that this person is using an unfair set of tools rather than this being a reflection that this person's conclusion may be more valid.

Is it really so surprising that Michelle Goldberg thinks that Dreams from My Father is a great literary work? Consider this passage from her magnum opus Kingdom Coming, of which she is so proud that she highlights it on that book's official website:

Thus for those who value secular society, apprehending the threat of Christian nationalism is tricky. It’s like being a lobster in a pot, with the water heating up so slowly that you don’t notice the moment at which it starts to kill you.

This was hilarious. Two liberals with nothing to back up their opinions. Michille in particular was like a kid.

I think the principal difference was that Ann would not let the babling liberal off the hook, while Eli did. I think part of it was that Ann knew Michelle was an airhead who had nothing and was not surprised by her inanities, while Eli clearly was surprised that Matt had nothing to say and tried to bail out. Also, Eli let Matt be the boss, so to speak, or at least get way with his immature reaction, while Ann clearly did not let Michelle get away with it.

I have no idea how much was related to gender. Michelle was clueless and embarassed and trying to whine herself out; Matt was clueless, but not embarassed, and looking for a way to punch his way out.

Funny that I didn't hear this when it came out. I always download Ann's appearances, but apparently my distaste for Ms. Goldberg got the better of me in November.

Most of the left-side bloggingheads in the pairings I watch are more than capable of civilized discussion, no matter the level of disagreement. I enjoy the Corn/Pinkerton, Beinart/(Jonah) Goldberg, Kleiman/McArdle and Scher/Lewis talks, even if I'm disagreeing with all eight of them.

But Goldberg is just a poorly behaved child, and not a bright one. Honestly, her low intellectual wattage is glaring, to reverse a metaphor. She's unwatchable. Even while being smacked down by Ann.

Both of the liberals want out, which is typical when they're called on their shit, and cowardly. (As you know, I'm not a "agree to disagree" kind of guy, and this is a good example why: it's obvious they're caught and merely don't want to admit it or deal with it.) As others have said, Michelle is kinda cute and all but her cowardice, and willingness to try and make Ann out to be the bad guy, is extremely - and i mean extremely -unattractive. I wouldn't want to be in the same room with someone who behaves as passive-aggressive as that.

On the other hand, the guy debating (the annoyingly high-pitched) Yglesias seemed reasonable, and I always love to see Ann get her dander up. (I'm all "Get her, Ann!") It's like she's speaking for us - she's our representative - rather than the slightly hippie Obama voter of the blog, which is odd.

Ultimately, rather than being a guy/girl thing, it's really exposing the ways liberals think they can cop-out when called on their shit. They think they can spout their nonsense and then, whenever it suits them, call the whole thing off.

The last time that was tried on me, and I acted like Ann, the guy threatened to call the cops on me.

I think Althouse's professorial experience came to good use here. She knows exactly how to call out a student's bullshit, and that's what she did to Goldberg. It was a thing of beauty. (And speaking of beauty -- two gorgeous women talking there!)

I think Eli was truly flummoxed by Matthew's idiocy, and so decided to move on rather than press him on it. Pressing an opponent's weakness in a productive way is not an easy skill to master. Eli should watch Althouse's bloggingheads and take notes.

But on the subject of sex differences, I'm going to say that if this were a discussion with a man instead of Althouse, Goldberg likely would have gotten away with pulling the waaah, waaah, I'm-going-to-cry act. Which is contemptible.

But she's probably used that cheap ploy successfully hundreds of times in her life in dozens of different circumstances, and was shocked when it failed. She didn't want to hang up, she wanted to use the threat to make Althouse back off and stop challenging her. Guess it didn't work.

I forgot to say -- I literally laughed out loud when Michelle said she thought of Dreams from My Father as a bildungsroman. Oh, the pretension! How delicious, though, that she just admitted in a very public way that she thinks it's a work of fiction.

I agree with those who don't see so much of a gender difference as I see two liberals whose arguments turn out to be shallow, a horrifying thought to both of them as their self-images are that they are intellectuals, so out of their discomfort they resort, somewhat sheepishly and passive-aggressively, to name-calling and evasion.

I'm not aware of Michele Goldberg other than as an occasional foil for Ann. I used to read Yglesias, thinking he was an incisive analyst, a position I no longer hold as I have seen him descend into glibness, hackery and "because I say so" and "isn't it obvious" and "oh c'mon you can't really mean that!" forms of argument. Like many liberals, for these two it all comes down to style, to aesthetics. They can't defend it, but they know what they like, and they like liberalism and they don't like anything else.

If there is a gender difference, it's that Ann as a semi-conservative woman wants to process Michelle's evasion and convince that her, at minimum, that she owes Ann an explanation of her position, while Lake kind of shrugs and says, in effect, "whatever." Men are either less brave in confrontations or more willing to let things go. As a man, I say it's the latter, but women would tend to disagree.

I don't see Michelle and Yglesias as different from one another in any substantial way. They seem like the same gender to me. Michelle is much more attractive. Maybe that's the real difference. Watching Michelle, I was thinking, "well, she is kind of cute." Watching Yglesias, I was thinking, "God, he's not even 30 yet and he looks like shit. I'm glad I didn't look that way when I was that age or I never would've gotten laid."

As I continue to think about it, it comes down to this: Men, including me, are basically shallow, and women try very hard not to be. For men, an intellectual argument of the sort displayed on Bloggingheads is just another form of competition and one-upmanship. For women, it's a sincere pursuit of resolution, a pursuit not surrendered easily. Because you care. Men don't.

Both of these guys are bullshit artists. Do either of them have a job? Who was the comedian who played the know-it-all-professor? Uh... Professor Irwin Corey, the "world's foremost authority."

These women are attractive?

Men seem incapable of learning. The brunette wants her man to be half a fag. Once married, she'll clean out the poor bastard and take his kids without a hint of conscience. She's absolutely worthless in bed because she doesn't give a fuck about anything except herself.

Those coy looks she's displaying are not sexual playfulness.

Translated: "I'm absolutely no good, completely self-interested, and I've never done a real day of work in my life. Wanna go for a ride, you dumb cowboy?"

Ann's a lawyer. You want to go to bed with a lawyer? I like her. You might as well go to bed with a man.

Jesus Christ!

I'm not much into the sex changer bullshit. As you can see.

Please tell me guys, what in the hell do you find attractive in these batshit crazy women?

The guys seemed to babble a bit as they went on. Not that impressed with either.

Ann was very professorial, trying to get her adversary to back up her statements. She seemed as if she wanted Ms. Goldberg to quit being a whiny little girl and assert herself, as an intellect as well as a woman.

Reminds me of a management prof I had when I was going for a grad certificate this time last year. He actually said to a student, "Why are you being so wishy-washy?", the exact same way Ann did.

I read both books. The first part of DFMF was a jumbled mess; I almost gave up. The second part was actually very interesting, more like a novel. Not Tolstoy, but interesting. Made me more likely to believe the stories that Bill Ayers was brought in to finish it up.

Sarah Palin's book was less novelistic. My wife started it first and couldn't get far because she found it boring. I read it through and liked it. Not a work of art, but the story of someone who actually did things. The woman may never get to be president, but she's got moxie.

Without dealing with the merits of the arguments, it seems to me, not having watch blogging heads before, that this is no different the the shouting shows on TV. What was it--the McGloughan group? a bunch of pundits yelling at each other? I see no difference. But I am an old fart and very opinionated--its my only flaw :)

John Stodder: Men are either less brave in confrontations or more willing to let things go.

Perhaps men have evolved the "ability" to drop relatively unimportant disputes because escalation between men can (pre-historically) become fatal, while disputes between women would more likely end with mutual shunning or restraint by others. Something akin to the idea that faculty politics are especially vicious because the stakes are low.

Both sad examples, really. Yglesias, when confronted with a countering argument backed by facts, resorts to accusations that Lake is "Netanyahu's lawyer" and not a "serious duscussant".

Goldberg, can't manage to muster a single point to back up her contention that Dreams From My Father is a work of literature. Watch her body language. When Ann pins her down, she's the guilty little kindergartener caught red-handed.

And of course, both resort to the liberal's last best hope, cutting off debate. When they're losing or can't back up their arguments, well then, of course, "there's no point in this any more. We're just wasting time."

The second one was a bildungsroman episode in the life of Goldberg. Will it teach her the lessons Ann obviously did some time ago. Truly, a student and teacher encounter. The master forcing the little grasshopper to face her assumptions so that some day she may snatch the pebble from her hand.

I expect Goldberg will not introspect her ideas. She will just become an older cranky liberal a la Pelosi doing work that in fact undermines her youthful ideals which many of us learn are not served by the direct un-nuanced leftist approach. Nuance is in fact a characteristic of conservatism in that demanding and expecting people to be self sufficient is the kindest of gifts and codling the cruelest.

More importantly, why does the media always represent men as fat and unattractive and the women as hot. Can you imagine those two men hitting on those two women and the global cooling that would result. Al Gore would swoon and sweep both those ladies away to his love cave with the 6 fireplaces, each fronted by a polar-bear skin rug. (All bears were victims of dog sled roadkill accidents.) Thanks, Todd.

Liberals are distracted by big words like birds are distracted by bright shiny objects. I think the leftist chick was surprised Ann wasn't so easily diverted and did not coo over the use of a $5 German word where a 5 cent English one would have sufficed. Imagine Beavis laughing and saying "she said Bildungsroman" and you get the level of thinking that is typical in leftist discussions. Normally that word would have given her the upper hand and brought the conversation to a halt so everyone could admire its rareness and beauty.

BTW, who cares whether the books Obama or Palin wrote are nuanced. In modern parlance "nuanced" means an inability to think clearly and is mainly used as a way of justifying doing the wrong thing. I couldn't give a fig how a politician expresses their ideas. I only care if those ideas are good for the country and liberty or whether they are harmful or tyrannical.

Liberals value emotion and form over substance so they are truly flummoxed when they have to actually think in a rational manner and defend their ideas. That is why Yglesias thought he was in a courtroom when someone challenged him. That comment was very revealing. Unfortunately he was too stupid to realize that he was the one in the dock, not Netanyahu, because his ideas were the ones on trial. In the end he was forced to plead no contest.

The woman blames herself and asks (pleads) to get out of the conversation. The man blames the other guy, and declares discussion to be over.

The other woman refuses to consent to the request, pushes the issue, blames herself for being emotional. The other man examines the cause (#2 is lawyering) of the request, reinterprets and mocks (agree to disagree), and picks a new topic.

Bildungsroman became the liberal word of the week just like "gravitas" back when Bush ran in 2000.

I was totally thinking first of the "gravitas" thing when I began that comment.

It's not just that liberals pick up the phrase of the week from talking points central. It's made almost hilarious by the continual lemming-like tendencies of even obviously intelligent liberals to mimic so shamelessly. Who do they think they're fooling?

Note the piece didn't mention Biden's threat that The Zero would 'do it to them' if they didn't go along with the 20B shakedown to be administered by an 'independent' commission run by the Pay Czar (Barton, of course shouldn't have apologized).

Which, of course, explains the look of pure hate on Svanberg in the picture Ann displayed yesterday.

Guys don't like to talk on the phone. Guys don't like unstructured arguments. Guys would rather fight (ad hom, shout, push, punch) and move on.

Women love to talk, on the phone or anywhere. They tolerate pointless discussion for the drama. Prof. Althouse baited the lib girl, and she took it. The lib was clearly embarrassed, but felt like she couldn't disengage. A guy in that situation would have said something like "yeah well eff you" and then hung up.

Nothing could be father from the truth. Not with females. I swear if you took their cellphones away they'd self destruct. What is it with women and the constant yakking on the phone anyway? Every day I drive home and if the car next to me has a woman in it, 9 times out of 10 she has a phone planted in her ear.

With respect to the blogging heads thing, I suggest they heads should actually go topless--tits rule and we can judge the caliber of their arguments by the anatomy of their breasts--I am sure Titus would agree. Now I am less sure about Lake and Iglesias--titus can weigh in on that match up

I do trust readers see my sarcasm--the intellectual content of blogging heads is IMO vapid--its simply an online continuation of the crap we see on cable TV--

Goldberg was predicting the "rise of Christian nationalism" almost ten years ago. She is a paranoid twit. I really don't understand why anyone takes her seriously. And she is not really very cute either. She is at best an "I went home with what I could before the bar lights came on" type.

You just look like a bully after a while, like beating up the on the retarded kid at school. Fun? Maybe, but you sure look bad.

The point in a debate (as I see it) is to get your opponent to concede the point. Just saying 'lets drop it' is a BS cop out. If I'm going to engage in an exchange then my goal is to not only prove my point but to get the other side to admit its validity over their own and if they don't I'll beat that horse into glue. Otherwise we're just expending air.

Also Goldberg isn't a retarded kid at school but rather considers herself some kind of intellectual. I'll grant she's probably quite intelligent but intelligence doesnt always mean smart. Or wise. Maybe Althouse being a 'twat' (I have to admit I love that word) is a sign for Goldberg to either up her game or realize that her cherished views are actually nothing but pablum.

Rich B. at 7:41 must be the only man in America who has read the works of both Palin and Obama. Sometimes I feel a little guilty about the amount of time I spend looking at pornography and the Cartoon Network, but then I find that they are souls even more benighted than mine.....Yglesias and Eli are trained killers. They know where a heated discussion can lead and do not wish to go there. Plus those years together in the SEALS have given their friendship a durable bond that can shake off minor disagreements......Althouse won the encounter, but she did it in a professorial way which was kind of unfair. It's like getting into an argument with a psychologist and having her say "Why do you think you feel this way".

i just saw the Yeglasias/Lake full diavlog. it seems that they also have more respect for each other beforehand, and are generally more friendly to each other. I get the sense that Michelle viewed Ann as an evil lady of the right, and I think people here have covered what Ann may think of Michelle ...

There's a semi-legitimate field of study in which people look at freeze-frames from video of people's facial expressions -- I think they call them "micro-expressions" or something like that -- and if you freeze the Goldberg/Althouse video a few times and look at Goldberg's petulant expressions, she looks one hell of a lot less cute.

Goldberg is unimpressive here, not because she wants to run away, but because she is such a conformist. The left values "nuance" too much; it has made a virtue of it. But "nuance," which is read as "thoughtfulness" can too often be as much the tool of the sophist as the sophisticate, which makes it worth a good deal less than the left pretends.

There is SOME value to both nuance and to ordinary common sense. I found Obama's book to be a prettily-written snooze. I have not read Palin's book, but I'm sure I'd consider it an unliterary snooze.

In a sense, that does describe both pols, one has pretty words and nothing else, the other has something but her words are workmanlike. At this point, I don't care about NUANCE. I care about capabilities. I think it would behoove the nation if the left ended its love-affair with the mystique of "nuance" and the right would lose its fear of it. Way too much has been hinged on "nuance" one way AND the other.

The point in a debate (as I see it) is to get your opponent to concede the point. Just saying 'lets drop it' is a BS cop out.

Maybe. But is this a debate or just a dialog? In any case, most debates don't end by a concession. The loser keeps chugging along, even though his argument is beaten into a tattered mess. At that point the winner says something cruel--but not too cruel--about the loser's intellect and they move on.

(About the cruelty bit, I debated in high school and realized that beating your opponent into submission can backfire. When your opponent--a girl--starts crying and whimpering, you really risk a backlash from the judge.)

Ann, you're so cute when you're angry! If I were Mead, I'd constantly leave the toilet seat up.

But seriously, I find the two videos pretty similar. Maybe the differences have more to do with the individuals than with their sex (or "gender," to be ungrammatical and sound sophisticated at the same time).

Notice each debate is like a poker game, where you must see, raise or fold. To "see" is to simply respond to the criticism, to "raise" is to ignore it and make your own criticism, to "fold" is to say. I'm hanging up. Each "player" choses the action that will best put him/her back in control of the "game."

We need a video of man v. woman to complete our study. Can you dig one up, Ann?

The reason I ask if you can see each other when you speak is because when Goldberg started rolling her eyes and biting the inside of her mouth, I would have loved for you to ask her what she was rolling her eyes about.

Or better, for you to have threatened to reach through the screen and roll her eyes for her.

I read about a third of these comments and then got totally bored. Maybe it got better after -- but mostly it's just people seeing the world as their political views define it. Just a whole bunch of confirmation bias. Why even bother to write that stuff? Just write "libtard" and move on. Boring.

So, Daniel, you read the comments until you realized they weren't conforming to your worldview, at which point you chose to stop reading them and instead wrote a comment complaining that people don't listen to contrary opinions?

Goldberg could have said "whatever", but Althouse, as stated, was too loud and unhinged to yield to such an obviously "liberal" tactic for use against people too righteous to listen to things like reason and debate civilly.

Althouse is clearly unhinged in the clip. She doesn't seem to understand the difference between someone appreciating nuance in someone else's work and whether or not they themselves are nuanced.

Completely unhinged.

The only meaningful "conservative" criticism of Dreams that I've read so far comes from Jack Cashill, who derides it as ghost-written based on the assertion that the alleged ghost-writer, William Ayers, is a good writer.

Chris Buckley has praised Obama's work.

The list goes on.

Cons are just reacting emotionally to the fact that more people enjoyed Obama's work and found something thoughtful in it than they did, or than they did when it came to the teenage 1/2-term Alaskan governor, Sarah Palin, whose insipid yammerings were the object of comparison for the text in question in the first place.

Click on Ritmo's page and he says his interest is in "continually defining the fine line between brilliance and gibberish." So it was another triumphant day for Ritmo, revealing the brilliance of the Goldberg Variations (e.g. nuance) v. Ann's gibberish. What would we do without you, oh wise one?

I don't see much of a difference between the two clips. In both, you have liberals who are not capable of defending a position which is under attack. Instead of arguing issue, they attack the other person. They go ad hominem.

In both you have liberals replacing thought with feeling. Who cares what you feel? I want to know what you think.

Michelle is obviously not a literature major (in spite of using cool terms like 'bildungsroman') because she has no idea how to engage in analytical discussion. Again, feelings don't matter; ideas do.

Both Yglesias and Goldberg lack the intellectual strength to defend their positions. This seems to be true of the Left today. They would rather talk about feelings than ideas. Michelle blathered about nuance but provided no evidence even when challenged. That's deeply UN-intellectual.

I'm unimpressed by both Goldberg and Yglesias. Althouse, I liked that you went in there swinging. That's my idea of debate—give it everything and don't back down.

Notice how she claims she's "bored" with the conversation. That's telling. Liberals hate to have to defend their position. That wasn't always the case, but it is today. That is how the status quo behaves, that is how the Establishment reacts. They don't feel they have to entertain any challenges to the ruling paradigm. Conservatives, on the other hand, relish the field of intellectual combat because we are on the outside looking in. We are the new insurgents, hungry and primed for battle. We are the new counter culture.